1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to telecommunications. More particularly, it relates to wireless based technologies.
2. Background of the Related Art
When a short message service center (SMSC) operates in a long term evolution (LTE)/CDMA (or GSM/CDMA, or UMTS/CDMA) dual mode network, the vast majority of GSM, UMTS and LTE mobiles support alphanumeric addressing where as many or most CDMA mobiles may not. This impacts the display of the originator of the message to the end-user of the mobile phone (or conversely the terminator, when the user is replying). Many corporations would like messages that they send to an end-user to appear with some form of corporate branding. E.g. ABXCorp would rather have the end user see a message from ABXCorp, rather than see that they have a message from 12345, and then have to figure out what those numbers represent.
A similar issue is also found in supporting external short message entities (ESMEs) from two different vendors. Some ESMEs support alphanumeric addressing while others do not.
Currently, if the mobile or ESME does not allow for message delivery with alphanumeric addresses encoded, the message to the mobile or the ESME may be discarded.
Alternatively, for messages destined to a Mobile, a generic numerical address may be substituted for the alphanumeric address, but a substituted generic numerical address is not meaningful to the Mobile end-user.
Many GSM/UMTS/LTE handsets support alphanumeric addresses. Some CDMA handsets may support alphanumeric (IA5) addresses. SMPP standard supports alphanumeric addresses, but many ESMEs/SMPP gateways have not fully implanted that portion of the standard. Thus, while end-points (some handsets and some ESMEs) may support alphanumeric addressing, the support for end-to-end alphanumeric addressing is not always complete.
ESMEs that are aware that a particular end-user handset has the alphanumeric capability could attempt delivery using that format, but that would require the ESME to maintain information about every phone number that it is sending to. Moreover, an ESME maintaining information about every phone number that it is sending to would be very susceptible to the user changing handset models.
Messages that are deleted due to protocol errors (e.g. handset cannot decode an address with alphanumeric characters) result in non-delivery to the subscriber. Messages that have had generic ‘alphanumeric to generic’ translation rules applied arrive at the handset without allowing the handset device to obtain the identity of the originator, thus also preventing the user device from responding.